


alive and awake

by cygnes



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 16:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18237578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: While awaiting their fate at the Bright Queen's court, Yasha has a little discussion with Fjord about unresolved issues.





	alive and awake

**Author's Note:**

> Logically, I know the reason the fake slavery was treated so flippantly in episode 56 was because Travis & Laura were literally absent for the Iron Shepherds plotline. Also, it happened months ago. It's not going to be at the forefront of all the players' minds, and that's totally reasonable! But I was interested in looking at an in-universe explanation of what might have motivated the characters' behavior there, especially Fjord's.
> 
> Spoilers through episode 56; full content warnings in endnote.

When she thought about it (which wasn’t often), Yasha had always assumed the Underdark would be _dark_. Instead, there is an artificial brightness that seems to leach the color from everyone but the drow. The Mighty Nein are being interviewed separately—interviewed, not interrogated. Not yet. Provisionally, with the glow of heroism still upon them, they are guests and not prisoners. 

Caleb was the first to be led away. Then Beau. Both are still gone. If the tide has turned back against them, none of those still waiting know it yet. Across the room, Jester and Caduceus are huddled around Nott. Nott’s voice rises and falls, intermittently frantic. She wants to be taken next. The Krynn have her husband, and now her boy, too. Jester doesn’t want anyone else to go; Caduceus is unnerved by the echoing stone of the holding room, equally lifeless and deathless.

Yasha is waiting. There isn’t enough information for her to feel any way except tense. A moment will come—an opening—and it will be clear enough to take some action. Fjord, too, is waiting apart from the others. The strange light washes his green skin almost to gray. A clarity comes to Yasha, though not the one she’s waiting for. This moment is its own opening. Yasha crosses to stand by Fjord. 

“I want to talk to you,” she says. Fjord looks up at her, wary. 

“Talk away,” he says. 

“To most people, I look human,” she says. Fjord says nothing, so she pushes: “Right?”

“I guess,” Fjord says. “Big and tough, but human.” Yasha nods.

“But you didn’t put me in…” she trails off, grasping for the word. Not saddle, not bridle. She draws lines across her chest with two fingers where the straps had cinched around Caleb and Beau. 

“Well, no, but you’re _from_ here,” Fjord says. “Nobody looking at you would mistake you for Imperial.”

“I’m from Xhorhas,” Yasha says, “but not _here_. I don’t look native to Asarias. And still, no…” She traces the lines across her chest again, dragging over skin and cloth. Thinking of the insistent press of leather. Fjord looks uncomfortable. “Do you blame them?”

“For what?” Fjord says. 

“For not getting taken by the Iron Shepherds,” Yasha says. “Or for taking so long to come for us.” Fjord startles at the accusation, almost flinching. “On the street in Asarias, you claimed Caleb as your servant and Beau had to watch. And today—” Today, the visible bonds of slavery. The degradation. “If it was because of how things had gone earlier, it should have been me and Caleb. So it must have been something else.” Yasha still aches to be given the chance to prove she’s worthy of the trust they returned to her without question. Does Caleb feel relief from that burden even now? 

“I wasn’t thinking about that at all,” Fjord says. Yasha judges this to be true. Fjord probably wasn’t thinking about it. But he might have been feeling it, somewhere down deep that he tried to ignore. Resentment leaks out like rot.

“We didn’t buy and sell people in my part of Xhorhas,” Yasha says. It feels strange to think of any part of that place as hers, to own a connection she would rather think of as severed. Only one thread still ties her there. “If someone owed you a debt, you could take payment in labor instead of in kind. If you took a captive in battle, you could do what you liked to them until their own people ransomed them. It was always personal. What happened to us was—wrong.” In such a fundamental way that she struggles to explain it. “They didn’t face us in combat. There wasn’t even a dispute to justify an ambush.” Defeat was the only way she had thought it could possibly happen to her. Even in the Empire, Yasha had been careful not to accrue debts that could be used against her. 

“Yeah, well, I think we can agree they didn’t play fair,” Fjord says. There’s a bitterness in his voice that time and distance have failed to soften or smooth away. “It wasn’t like I was wrong about how they do things in Asarias. First time around, it was other people who wanted to buy Caleb. Just assumed he’d be for sale.” Fjord exhales hard. “Scared the shit out of me, to be honest. I thought if, if he and Beau were _ours_ and there was no doubt about it, nobody’d dare to try and take them. And then when that seemed to work…” he trails off.

“Did you start to feel it was real?” Yasha says. She knows the answer to that will be no; she thinks that by asking she might get a real answer, too.

“No, but I started to think it wasn’t such a bad thing for them to know what it was like,” Fjord says. “In the Empire, they were the ‘normal’ ones, the ones everyone assumed were in charge, and maybe they’d learn something from seeing the other side of things.” Fjord laughs: a single dry, despairing _ha_. “Makes me sound like a real asshole, huh?” Yasha shrugs one shoulder.

“It’s hard to think of others when you’ve been hurt badly,” she says. She isn’t thinking of the suspicious sidelong glances, though, maybe because looking foreign wasn’t as bad as looking _different_. She’s thinking about chains rubbing against bare skin until it blisters and breaks. Frantic, frightened humming from the next cage over, muffled by a leather gag—and, worse, the hard wheeze when the humming was stopped by a kick to the gut. Maybe Fjord’s dreams of his patron are enough to keep him from dreaming of the Sour Nest. The Stormlord’s summons and tests have never been enough to chase the sounds and feelings out of her own clamorous dreams.

The pain is not, never was, the worst part. No, Yasha has known pain a long time. The worst was—is—the helplessness. She feels it now, in the stone room underground, clawing its way up her throat. It feels like rage, in some ways, but it takes her strength instead of adding to it.

“I think Jester saw it as a game,” Fjord says. “She didn’t mean to hurt them or teach them a lesson or anything like that.” 

Yasha isn’t sure he’s right. Something has been twisted up inside Jester since the Sour Nest, too. She’s just better at hiding it. Everyone knows Jester is playful, guileless, and kind, so she can be cruel as long as she pretends not to know she’s doing it. And she must know. Must have known. Beau didn’t settle into the role like a second skin the way Caleb did. Her unhappiness was clear. 

And how must all this look to Caduceus? Play-acting out old wounds that he only knows the edges of. 

“You think this is it?” Fjord says. His voice sounds more resonant than usual. It might be because of the echo of the stone around them. It might not. “You think they’re going to pick us off one by one, and we’re going to let them?”

“No,” Yasha says. Nott is sitting still and quiet now, her head in her hands. Having followed Fjord’s line of reasoning, maybe. “I think if they try to kill us, we’ll make it hard for them.” Fjord smiles tightly. His tusks poke out against his stretched-thin lips. Maybe not a leader, or at least not the one they need right now. But he knows who he is. He knows who he’s hurt. He’s not going to die quietly without trying to lift that burden from his own shoulders and theirs.

The door opens to a figure in familiar chitinous armor. Fjord’s hand hangs open by his side, fingers softly curled and ready to grasp a hilt. They wait together for a moment. An opening.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for pervasive discussion of slavery across a couple of cultural contexts, along with prejudice, captivity, brief torture, emotional fallout from all of the above.
> 
> (Regarding the ominous ending: don't worry, guys, Caleb is getting a hot stone massage and Beau is trying and failing to resist flirting with Leylas Krynn herself; everything is fine even if it looks pretty bleak.)


End file.
